Dad hacks Donkey Kong for his daughter; Pauline now saves Mario

Princess: your Mario is in another castle.

When Mike Mika’s daughter was sad to learn she couldn’t play as a girl character in classic Donkey Kong, her father decided a little hacking was in order. Mika modified the ROM of the game so that the damsel/white-knight roles in the game were switched. Now Pauline (Nintendo's precursor to the better known Princess Peach) runs, jumps, and dodges rolling barrels to save the dulcet Mario at the top of the screen, according to a Saturday post on reddit.

Mika posted a video of his modified version of the game, which features Pauline as the playable character. Mika notes in the video description, as well as an anonymized post to Facebook, that his daughter was accustomed to being able to play a girl (Princess Toadstool) in Super Mario Bros. 2. She wanted to be able to do the same in Donkey Kong.

According to a seemingly uninvolved poster on the reddit thread, Mika may have used Tile Layer Pro to redraw Mario’s frames and change the palettes within the ROM. According to another reddit user, it's the ROM drawn from the 2010 Wii virtual console version of the game.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen a dad taking a paring knife to a video game to better his daughter’s experience. Earlier this year, Mike Hoye made public his modification of The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker where he changed all of the pronouns from male to female in order to more correctly address his daughter as she played the protagonist. Mika has not yet made any indication of whether he will distribute his modified version of Donkey Kong.

Wait, so a game made back when the vast majority of gamers were guys is considered sexist because it was targeted at the only audience there was at the time?

I don't know what happened, but I'm seeing more and more of these articles in the last few days about how sexist and games are, and then they show games from back when women generally didn't play at all.

I have the same four characters that I make in almost every RPG (and MMORPG) I play, two are male and two are female.

I think people should really get over the idea that the character you play in a game reflects or represents YOU. As a general rule, I prefer playing female protagonists, but for a very sexist reason. The only time I see the character in a game as an analog of myself is when I specifically created the character to look like me. Other then that, they are their own character, and whether they are male or female should only depend on the plot, or the story the designer is trying to tell.

One thing to note. We all know that video gaming is predominantly male based type of entertainment. Only in the last 10-15 years have we seen female heroes. And most of those games are not designed for young kids. Are you going to hand your little kid Tomb Raider at 9 years of age? Sorry but this is epic. It shatters gender rolls. This is a good thing.

There's a long-standing community of hundreds of people built around ROM hacking that's been doing everything from full game localizations to complete ground-up redesigns of levels and gameplay for the past 15 years, and yet somehow hacks consisting of simple male-to-female sprite changes are repeatedly newsworthy. I guess the expectation is that everyone's supposed to inflate the meaning of this and fawn over how progressive and forward thinking it is to PC-retcon old games that are already consigned to history.

Wait, so a game made back when the vast majority of gamers were guys is considered sexist because it was targeted at the only audience there was at the time?

I don't know what happened, but I'm seeing more and more of these articles in the last few days about how sexist and games are, and then they show games from back when women generally didn't play at all.

I'm really confused why people are upset over this. His daughter wanted something, he obviously has an interest in modding things, so he takes it up as a hobby. His daughter learns that if she doesn't like something about the world if you're creative enough you can find ways to try and change it. The dad makes his daughter happy and gets to play around with something he is interested. It's a win/win.

Fairly pointless, but I do like to see parents really doing things for their kids. Custom beds, custom ROMs; pretty much anything that gets them actively involved with their offspring.

Even if it is essentially pointless, doesn't make it any less important.

Yeah, I'd rather build a tree house or something for my kids, but this is kinda of cool (and regardless, demonstrates involved parents which is always good). I do suspect it's only newsworthy though (here or on reddit) because it's probably supposed to be taken as indirect evidence or sexism; otherwise we'd have have a crap ton of articles on the innumerable other, more complex mods being created.

I'm really confused why people are upset over this. His daughter wanted something, he obviously has an interest in modding things, so he takes it up as a hobby. His daughter learns that if she doesn't like something about the world if you're creative enough you can find ways to try and change it.

I don't think many people are upset over the hack, but I'm upset this stuff doesn't happen all the time.

bigdrew172 wrote:

The dad makes his daughter happy and gets to play around with something he is interested. It's a win/win.

Try to tell the US government that it's a win/win. According to them, it is criminal activity that can get you bankrupted by statutory damages and/or sent to jail.

Also, tell it to the entertainment industry who is trying to get these laws enforced more tightly than they are now, and amended to have higher penalties and cover more things.

The US government is also putting pressure on the rest of the world to move in the same direction. Sadly the pressure is working. The latest effort is TPP, which is currently at "round 16" of negotiations according to the US government, but the contents of the negotiations is still secret and none of the organisations standing in opposition are allowed to know anything about it. Everything we know about it (mostly from illegal leaks) is bad.

The basic theory seems to be that if you make nintendo's game better and re-distribute it for free, then nintendo is loosing money because they could have made the same improvement and charged money for it. I guess that's probably true, but I personally care more about culture and creativity than corporate profits.

One thing to note. We all know that video gaming is predominantly male based type of entertainment. Only in the last 10-15 years have we seen female heroes. And most of those games are not designed for young kids. Are you going to hand your little kid Tomb Raider at 9 years of age? Sorry but this is epic. It shatters gender rolls. This is a good thing.

Samus would like to have a word with you.

As to the "story" itself, who cares? The rom hacking scene is very large and have produced some amazing hacks over the years, this is not one of them. I don't have an issue with a father doing a simple sprite hack so his daughter can play as Pauline instead of Mario, but is this really worthy of an article?

Wow. What negative comments! A girl wanted to play a video game where the lead female character isn't a mere damsel in distress, and her daddy mods the game. The, everyone piles onto him for doing it.

Anita Sarkeesian has a video that talks about this very subject "The Damsel in Distress" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6p5AZp7r_Q). What is interesting is that you could play the princess in Mario II, but that was sort of accidental. In Mario III, the option of playing the princess was taken away.

Wait, so a game made back when the vast majority of gamers were guys is considered sexist because it was targeted at the only audience there was at the time?

I don't know what happened, but I'm seeing more and more of these articles in the last few days about how sexist and games are, and then they show games from back when women generally didn't play at all.

I have the same four characters that I make in almost every RPG (and MMORPG) I play, two are male and two are female.

I think people should really get over the idea that the character you play in a game reflects or represents YOU. As a general rule, I prefer playing female protagonists, but for a very sexist reason. The only time I see the character in a game as an analog of myself is when I specifically created the character to look like me. Other then that, they are their own character, and whether they are male or female should only depend on the plot, or the story the designer is trying to tell.

It's Sunday. This is a feel good story about a father modding a game at his daughters request. How the flying spaghetti monster did you read so much into it?

Yes, I know railing against political correctness is all the rage these days, but you should look at the world for what it really is sometimes, not everything is a gigantic statement.

I am sure that Tomb Raider which was out in 1996 qualifies as a game with female protagonist -- that was 17 years ago so your statement is not quite accurate.

Don't forget Samus, short of having a female space ship in Asteroids you aren't going to get much beyond that. I do think there is a little to be said for the preponderance of masculine heroes in videogames, but videogames are largely drawing ideas and inspiration from narrative and literary traditions, and I don't think it's a crime that the knights in Le Morte d'Arthur are men or that the average heroes and adventurers are often masculine, seeing as violence is something more commonly masculine than feminine. That games pick up on that is not necessarily sexist (although some are for sure), but could just as well be realist.

I just finished another play through of The Longest Journey and April Ryan is one of the best conceived characters ever, and Torquest wrote her out of a desire to create a good character, not to write a man or a woman, and the fact that she's not some Doom-style action hero makes her a much better female character than if she was randomly shoved into a Call or Duty game or something. I guess I feel like all the analysis of whether this gender choice or that gender choice is racist is removing us from the goal of just having artful games will great characters and themes, sure, a few of those themes and characters will hinge on gender and sexual statuses, but I'd rather the writers and designers try to do something timeless with that rather than be sucked into a 21st century feminist debate and writing all their men and women based on that paradigm. I wouldn't wish that on anyone, haha.